The Eye (2002) by Danny Pang and Oxide Chun Pang

Director: Danny Pang, Oxide Chun Pang

Year: 2002

Country: Hong Kong/Singapore/Thailand/United Kingdom/Netherlands

Alternate Titles: Gin gwai; Seeing Ghosts

Genre: Ghosts

Plot:

After receiving a special operation, a young woman who attempted to cure her blindness and start to see again suddenly experiences a series of haunting ghostly visions around her and her friends, and must track down the previous owner of the eyes to find out why she's seeing the visions.

Review:

For the most part, this was a decent if really uneven entry. The main element working with this one is that the overall story is okay, if nothing spectacular, and does an incredibly important element in how we’re made to feel sympathy for the condition. Since we get introduced to her at the point just before the surgery and its eventual aftermath of everything by going through the aftermath of the situation in getting her used to the newfound abilities, recuperating with her family, and trying to get acclimated to seeing things for herself instead of relying on others or touch, this creates a fun starting point about her condition. As everything here starts to work out and the encounters are focused on bringing about the various tasks and activities she tries to accomplish to help her get back to normal, this all serves to make her more endearing as time goes on and everything gets interrupted by the slew of ghostly encounters throughout here.

This becomes quite a bit more pronounced when the ghostly visions and hallucinations start to become more pronounced. With her condition rendering everything with a bit of confusion over whether it’s actually happening to her or just unfamiliarity with the world around her now that she can see again, which by itself is a fantastic concept, there are still enough chilling moments played out here. From the first encounter with the child in her apartment looking for a missing report card, a ghostly spirit following her at a supermarket shopping trip, or an outright chilling sequence in an elevator as she tries to get off the lift before a ghost inside with her can get close enough to grab her, it provides some fun once it gets going and leads nicely into the final half. Getting not just the revelations about what’s going on through some brutal backstory reenactments about what happened to the original donor but some fun elements as well, including an exceptional sequence within a small, rural village with a typically creepy-looking ghost and perhaps as over-the-top a finale as there could be when a whole city block and the cars on it blow up in true action-movie style. Overall, these are what manage to give this a lot to like.

There are some issues here holding it back. The biggest issue here is the general pace of this one, where a lot of the middle half is completely muddled with a lot of boring, low-driven exposition that doesn't make a lot of sense or carry any kind of importance or suspense to it. This is filled with far too many scenes of her and her doctor running around the country trying to find the original donor and getting caught up in the red tape of what’s going on, so it somewhat drops a lot of the haunting visions and hallucinations to deal with these issues instead. As a result, the pacing drops off considerably in that section and never really picks up again until the finale, when it starts up again, causing the middle to be a bit of a slog to get through. The other drawback here is a series of lame and completely non-threatening ghost scenes that don't come off scary at all, where the ghosts aren’t all that threatening for what they actually do, and overall this one manages to turn out quite decent.

Overview: ***.5/5

A really fun if somewhat slightly flawed genre effort, there’s quite a lot to like here that keeps this one going despite a couple of minor flaws that impact this but aren’t too detrimental. Those with an appreciation for this style of genre fare, who are big Asian horror fans in general, or who are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.